Best Buy becomes first independent iPhone retailer — NEW YORK - Best Buy Co. will start selling the iPhone on Sept. 7, becoming first U.S. chain to do so outside of Apple Inc.'s and AT&T Inc.'s own stores. — The announcement by Best Buy expands the availability of Apple's vaunted phone …

Three-alarm fire scorches key building on Apple campus — A three-alarm fire burned for more than three hours late Tuesday night at Apple's Cupertino headquarters before firefighters were able to fully extinguish the blaze. — The Santa Clara County Fire Department said it received reports …

Does Good Tech Need PR? — Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there's a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news sites and other agents in order to get coverage for their clients. Tiny web tech companies pay $5k …

Does the Thrill of the Chase Make PR Obsolete? — As a relatively high-profile blogger, I get to see things that others in PR, even those who blog, don't experience. One of those is my Gmail inbox. It's my barometer for how the public relations is adapting in this era of change. The forecast?

Spot Runner lays off 100 — Nick Grouf once told me he started his online-advertising agency, Spot Runner, in Los Angeles, not Silicon Valley, for one reason: The video-production talent he needed to customize television ads en masse was down south. Now, a laid-off employee tells us Spot Runner …

Facebook Users Get More Control Over Feeds — Facebook will tweak the user profile sometime tonight to let users fine tune the news items delivered to them on their home page. Currently users can filter news items to see top items, status updates, new photos and posted items from friends.

Why Apple doesn't do “Concept Products” — Everyone has a favorite “concept car.” Whether it's the '54 Firebird, '64 Stiletto, '80 Epcot or '88 Sunraycer, these “flights of imagination” all have one thing in common: they weren't for real. — General Motors had no intention of selling these cars …

Car Internet Debuts From Chrysler — Auburn Hills, Mich. — Chrysler will become the first car maker to offer Internet capability Aug. 25, when its parts division begins selling a Mopar car cellular/Wi-Fi hot spot, expected to be the first of many Internet offerings from the car companies.

HSBC could order 200,000 iPhones — Global banking giant HSBC is considering ditching the BlackBerry and adopting Apple's iPhone as its standard staff mobile device, a move that could result in an order for some 200,000 iPhones. — “We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective …

Facebook: No. 1 Globally — The social network site has vaulted over rival MySpace in worldwide audience growth, thanks to tools that translate content into many languages — When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to illustrate the impact of his social network, he tells a story …

What Are Search Blogs Talking About? — Lee Odden wrote Word Visualization on Search Marketing Blogs, where he used a tool named Wordle to show what the search blogs are actually talking about. Wordle forms a tag cloud, of the most used words and phrases on a particular blog.

Nvidia: We underestimated AMD — Nvidia had one ugly second quarter. It lost money. It took a charge for defective chips. And it's stuck with low-margin inventory it has to burn off. Amazing how a little price competition from AMD's ATI can magnify poor execution at Nvidia.